Hollywood vs The Novel

Can you list any books made into movies that Hollywood hasn’t hacked apart?

Anyone who is a serious reader can form a long list of movies that Hollywood utterly failed in their execution. That list is easy to make.

Here are three books I think Hollywood managed to do well:

Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk

Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

Even still, it’s easy to pick out places where Hollywood deviated from the book.

Is it fair to include Game of Thrones in the list? Granted, HBO is outside the normal distribution channels utilized by Hollywood. They did manage to follow Martin’s novels pretty closely so far. Of course, the opposite side of that coin is True Blood, which veers all over the novels from what I’m told.

If failure to match up to the book is the norm, why are we consistently taken by surprise when the movie in no way resembles the book except for the character names? Do we maintain too high expectations of Hollywood and their mass produced feature films? Perhaps we should simply consider the author’s work as canon and the movie as an Alternate Universe?